Who invented passenger ships

True, the s marked the end of an era, in that genuine cruise liners — ships that offered line voyages — were rapidly becoming a thing of the past, pushed into obsolescence by Mr Boeing and friends, who could send people around the world far quicker and more efficiently than anything travelling by sea.

Therefore, the ship owners of the world had a problem. They still had berths to fill, but people were increasingly reluctant to hand over large amounts of cash for a journey that could now be taken in hours instead of days.

Ocean voyages were also still seen as the preserve of the well-heeled, an image problem not helped by the Royal Family, who continued to be seen on the Royal Yacht Britannia, the ultimate bastion of status and prestige. Perhaps almost inevitably, it took a Viking to point the cruise business back in the right direction.

Norwegian shipping magnate Knut Utstein Kloster had been reading the tea leaves for several years and could see a potential market opening up, using existing tonnage and new routes. The 8,ton Sunward had been a colossal failure on the Southampton-Gibraltar ferry service but, transferred to Miami and with the Caribbean as her playground, a whole new holiday type was born.

Norwegian Caribbean became Norwegian Cruise Line, Arison left to start his own fledgeling company, a little thing called Carnival Cruise Lines, and they were joined in by another Norwegian concern, Royal Caribbean Cruise Line, a joint venture between three Oslo-based shipping businesses. To all intents and purposes, modern cruising was now up and running. Norwegian effectively broke the mould of cruising, and the other players picked it up and ran with it.

And those Vikings, well, they were definitely involved. What switched you on to cruising? Where was your first cruise experience? Give us your thoughts in the Comments section below. You really need to look up Albert Ballin. He was the Chairman of HAPAG and stunned his board of directors when he announced the first winter cruise around The board laughed at the idea that anyone would want to go on a cruise for any other reason than to cross the Atlantic.

Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Who Invented Cruise Ships? October 1, Share:. Blouin says:. June 29, at am. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Do you have a booking with this line? Yes No.

Please tick to receive our latest special offers, event invitations and pre-registration opportunities. Lines went bankrupt and passenger ships were sold. Modern cruising as we know it, emerged in the s, says Cruise Line History , when lines began marketing cruise holidays to the general public and promoting the holiday as the destination rather than focussing on the transportation element. Cruise ships came laden with amenities and entertainment options, immortalised in the hit television series The Love Boat , which ran from to and starred Princess Cruises vessel Pacific Princess.

Excellent piece. Celebrity Cruises My Cruises. Win A Trip To Norway. A brief history of cruising. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter. Type to search or hit ESC to close. Savannah left from the U. While the Savannah only used its steam engine for approximately 85 hours roughly 12 percent of the trip , the voyage made history, and the era of the steamship began [source: Columbia Encyclopedia ].

The passenger ship industry flourished in the late s and early s, courtesy of the steam engine and of the growing number of American immigrants crowding ocean liners. Trans-Atlantic passage was still primarily one way, although affluent passengers traveled back and forth between England and New York for business or holiday.

Ambitious British shipping company White Star Lines began aggressively building the first fleet of ocean liners in and would revolutionize trans-Atlantic passage over the next 60 years.

White Star set records in size and grandeur, building, among others, three large ships dubbed Olympic Class liners. The Olympic, Britannic and Titanic broke the mold of traditional ocean liners, and their speed and interior features made other ships look obsolete. But ocean travel was on the verge of changing.

The popularity of trans-Atlantic sea passage gradually declined with the arrival of the airplane. People could fly to more destinations in a fraction of the time it took on an ocean liner, so shipping companies changed their business model to focus on tourism instead of passenger transportation. In , the American-Hamburg Company built the first ship specifically designed for cruises. The Prinzessin Victoria Luise measured feet meters long by 52 feet 16 meters wide, and was 4, gross tons [source: Norway-Heritage ].

In nautical terms a ton , typically called a gross register ton or gross ton , does not measure weight; it represents cubic feet of internal capacity. During the early s, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler boosted the fledgling cruise industry by offering holiday packages to German workers as part of a state-sponsored effort to unite the nation.